1 ‘Il y a encore une classe de valets et une classe de maîtres; mais ce ne sont pas toujours les mêmes individus, ni surtout les mêmes familles qui les composent; et il n'y a pas plus de perpétuité dans le commandement que dans l'obéissance … A chaque instant, le serviteur peut devenir maître et aspire à la devenir; le serviteur n'est donc pas un autre homme que le maître.’ A. de Tocqueville, De la démocratie en Amerique ([1835] London, 1961), 185. The English is taken from the Henry Reeve translation of 1898, available online at http://xroads.virginia.edu/~HYPER/DETOC/ [last accessed 5 February 2008].

2 J. S. Mill, Principles of political economy ([1848] London, 1909).

3 K. Marx, The eighteenth Brumaire of Louis Napoleon ([1852] New York, 1898).

4 W. Sombart, Why is there no socialism in America? ([1906] New York, 1976).

5 Mill, Principles of political economy, 393.

6 Ben S. Bernanke, ‘The level and distribution of economic well-being: remarks before the Greater Omaha Chamber of Commerce, Omaha, Nebraska, February 6, 2007’, http://www.federalreserve.gov/boarddocs/speeches/2007/20070206/default.htm [last accessed 6 February 2008].

7 DiPrete, T. A., ‘Is this a great country? Upward mobility and the chance for riches in contemporary America’, Research in Social Stratification and Mobility 25 (2007), 89–95.CrossRefGoogle Scholar

8 See for example the Economic Mobility Project (an American private-initiative project), at http://www.economicmobility.org [last accessed 6 February 2008].

9 C. Kerr et al., Industrialism and industrial man ([1960] New York and Oxford, 1973); Inkeles, A., ‘Industrial man: the relation of status to experience, perception and value’, American Journal of Sociology 66 (1960), 1–31CrossRefGoogle Scholar; and Form, W., ‘Comparative industrial sociology and the convergence hypothesis’, Annual Review of Sociology 5 (1979), 1–25.CrossRefGoogle Scholar

10 P. M. Blau and O. D. Duncan, The American occupational structure (New York, 1976).

11 For a survey of those studies see van Leeuwen, M. H. D. and Maas, I., ‘Long-term social mobility: research agenda and a case study (Berlin, 1825–1957)’, Continuity and Change 11 (1996), 399–433CrossRefGoogle Scholar, esp. pp. 400–5; see also the special issue of Historical Methods (31 (1998)) on social mobility, edited by C. A. Lynch.

12 R. Erikson and J. H. Goldthorpe, The constant flux: a study of class mobility in industrial societies (1992, Oxford).

13 Ganzeboom, H. B. G., Luijkx, R. and Treiman, D. J., ‘Intergenerational class mobility in comparative perspective’, Research in Social Stratification and Mobility 9 (1989), 3–79.Google Scholar

14 H. Kaelble, Historical research on social mobility: Western Europe and the USA in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries (London, 1981); Ganzeboom, H. B. G., Treiman, D. J. and Ultee, W. C., ‘Comparative intergenerational stratification research: three generations and beyond’, Annual Review of Sociology 17 (1991), 277–302CrossRefGoogle Scholar; van Leeuwen and Maas, ‘Long-term social mobility’; Erikson and Goldthorpe, The constant flux; J. H. Goldthorpe, On sociology: numbers, narratives, and the integration of research and theory (Oxford, 2000); Maas, I. and van Leeuwen, M. H. D., ‘Industrialization and intergenerational mobility in Sweden’, Acta Sociologica 45 (2002), 179–94CrossRefGoogle Scholar; R. Breen ed., Social mobility in Europe (Oxford, 2004); D. Mitch, J. Brown and M. H. D. van Leeuwen eds., Origins of the modern career (Aldershot, 2004).

15 Kaelble, Historical research on social mobility.

16 Kerckhoff, A., ‘Institutional arrangements and stratification processes in industrial societies’, Annual Review of Sociology 15 (1995), 323–47CrossRefGoogle Scholar, and W. Müller and Y. Shavit, ‘The institutional embeddedness of the stratification process: a comparative study of qualifications and occupations in thirteen countries’, in W. Müller and Y. Shavit eds., From school to work: a comparative study of educational qualifications and occupational destinations (Oxford, 1998), 1–48.

17 See e.g. D. J. Treiman, ‘Industrialization and social stratification’, in E. O. Lauman ed., Social stratification: research and theory for the 1970's (Indianapolis, 1970), 207–34; D. J. Treiman, Occupational prestige in comparative perspective (New York, 1977); A. Miles, Social mobility in nineteenth- and early twentieth-century England (Basingstoke, 1999); A. Miles and D. Vincent eds., Building European society: occupational change and social mobility in Europe, 1840–1940 (Manchester, 1993). Maas and van Leeuwen, ‘Industrialization and intergenerational mobility in Sweden’; and D. J. Treiman, H. B. G. Ganzeboom and S. Rijken, ‘Educational expansion and educational achievement in comparative perspective’, Working Paper, Californian Center for Population Research UCLA (2003).

18 M. J. Maynes, Taking the hard road: life course in French and German workers' autobiographies in the era of industrialization (Chapel Hill and London, 1995), 122.

19 Kalmijn, M., ‘Mother's occupational status and children's schooling’, American Sociological Review 59 (1994), 257–75CrossRefGoogle Scholar; S. Korupp, Mothers and the process of social stratification (Amsterdam, 2000); Kearny, M. S., ‘Intergenerational mobility for women and minorities in the United States’, The Future of Children 16 (2) (2006), 37–53.CrossRefGoogle Scholar

20 Miles, Social mobility in nineteenth- and early twentieth-century England.

21 McBride, T. M., ‘Social mobility for the lower classes: domestic servants in France’, Journal of Social History 8 (1974), 63–78CrossRefGoogle Scholar; H. Bras, Zeeuwse meiden: dienen in de levensloop van vrouwen (Amsterdam, 2002), and ‘Social change: the institution of service and youth: the case of service in the lives of rural-born Dutch women, 1840–1940’, Continuity and Change 19 (2004), 241–64; Maas, I. and van Leeuwen, M. H. D., ‘Over dienstboden, landarbeidsters en andere werkende vrouwen: beroepen van jonge vrouwen en hun moeders in de huwelijksakten van de Zeeuwse Burgerlijke Stand’, Zeeland 15 (2006), 44–59.Google Scholar

22 R. van Gaalen and F. van Poppel, ‘Kinderen en de veranderingen in de gezinsstructuur in de afgelopen anderhalve eeuw’, in T. van der Lippe et al. eds., De maakbaarheid van de levensloop (Assen, 2007), 21–58.

23 Van Bavel, J., ‘The effect of fertility limitation on intergenerational social mobility: the quality-quantity trade off during the demographic transition’, Journal of Biosocial Science 38 (4) (2006), 553–569.CrossRefGoogle ScholarPubMed

24 Biblarz, T. J., Bengtson, V. L. and Bucur, A., ‘Social mobility across three generations’, Journal of Marriage and the Family 58 (1996), 188–200CrossRefGoogle Scholar; Erola, R. and Moiso, P., ‘Social mobility over three generations in Finland 1950–2000’, European Sociological Review 23 (2) (2007), 169–83CrossRefGoogle Scholar; Warren, J. R. and Hauser, R. M., ‘Social stratification across three generations: new evidence from the Wisconsin Longitudinal Study’, American Sociological Review 62 (1997), 561–72.CrossRefGoogle Scholar

25 Campbell, C. and Lee, J., ‘Social mobility from a kinship perspective: rural Liaoning 1789–1909’, International Review of Social History 48 (2003), 1–26.CrossRefGoogle Scholar

26 O. Boonstra, ‘The intergenerational transmission of social inequality in a pre-industrial society: ascription and achievement in Eindhoven, 1800–1900’, in A. Blok and D. Damsma eds., Generations in labour history (Amsterdam, 1989).

27 Pélissier, J.-P., Rébaudo, D., Maas, I. and van Leeuwen, M. H. D., ‘Migration and endogamy according to social class: France, 1803–1986’, International Review of Social History 50 (2005), 219–46.CrossRefGoogle Scholar

28 S. Thernstrom, The other Bostonians: poverty and progress in the American metropolis 1880–1970 (Cambridge MA, 1973).

29 F. van Tubergen, Immigrant integration: a cross-national study (New York, 2006).

30 See van Leeuwen and Maas, ‘Long-term social mobility’, 400–5.

31 D. Landes, The unbound Prometheus: technological change and industrial development in Western Europe from 1750 to the present (Cambridge, 1969), 546.

32 See, for example, the seminal studies of Treiman, ‘Industrialization and social stratification’, and Occupational prestige.

33 J. C. Brown, D. Mitch and M. H. D. van Leeuwen, ‘The history of the modern career: an introduction’, in Mitch, Brown and van Leeuwen, Origins of the modern career, 3–41.

34 Becker, G. and Tomes, N., ‘An equilibrium theory of the distribution of income and intergenerational mobility’, Journal of Political Economy 87 (6) (1979), 1153–89CrossRefGoogle Scholar; Restuccia, D. and Urrutia, C., ‘Intergenerational persistence of earnings: the role of early and college education’, The American Economic Review 94 (2004), 1354–78CrossRefGoogle Scholar; G. Solon, ‘A model of intergenerational mobility variation over time and place’, in M. Corak ed., Generational income mobility in North America and Europe (Cambridge, 2004), 38–47.

35 Randall Collins, The credential society: an historical sociology of education and stratification (New York, 1979), 27.

36 Ibid., 9.

37 Pierre Bourdieu and J. Passeron, Reproduction in education, society and culture (Thousand Oaks CA, 1974).

38 Treiman, Ganzeboom and Rijken, ‘Educational expansion and educational achievement in comparative perspective’, 2.

39 R. Penn, Skilled workers in the class structure (Cambridge, 1985).

40 Hart, R. A., ‘Women doing men's work and women doing women's work: female work and pay in British wartime engineering’, Explorations in Economic History 44 (2007), 114–30.CrossRefGoogle Scholar

41 See for example F. Parkin, Class inequality and political order (London, 1971); W. D. Connor, Socialism, politics and equality: hierarchy and change in Eastern Europe and the USSR (New York, 1979); M. Niessen et al., International comparative research: social structure and public institutions in Eastern and Western Europe (Oxford, 1984); Simkus, A. and Andorka, R., ‘Inequalities in educational attainment in Hungary, 1923–1973’, American Sociological Review 47 (1982), 740–51CrossRefGoogle Scholar; Wong, R. S., ‘Understanding cross-national variation in occupational mobility’, American Sociological Review 55 (1990), 560–73CrossRefGoogle Scholar; Simkus, A. et al. , ‘Changes in social mobility in two societies in the crux of transition: a Hungarian–Irish comparison, 1943–1973’, Research in Social Stratification and Mobility 9 (1990), 33–78Google Scholar; and Treiman, Ganzeboom and Rijken, ‘Educational expansion and educational achievement in comparative perspective’.

42 Simkus and Andorka, ‘Inequalities in educational attainment in Hungary’.

43 S. Fitzpatrick, Education and social mobility in the Soviet Union, 1921–1934 (Cambridge, 1979).

44 P. Mateju, ‘Who won and who lost in a socialist redistribution in Czechoslovakia?’, in Yossi Shavit and Hans-Peter Blossfeld eds., Persistent inequality: changing educational attainment in thirteen countries (Boulder CO, 1993), 251–72.

45 Connor, Socialism, politics and equality.

46 Wong, R. S., ‘Socialist stratification and mobility: cross national and gender differences in Czechoslovakia, Hungary and Poland’, Social Science Research 24 (1995), 302–28.CrossRefGoogle Scholar

47 S. Rijken, ‘The effects of social origin on status attainment in first job’, in S. Rijken, Educational expansion and status attainment: a cross national and over-time comparison (Utrecht, 1999), 79–110, passim and 118.

48 Treiman, Ganzeboom and Rijken, ‘Educational expansion and educational achievement in comparative perspective’.

49 Gerber, T. P. and Hout, M., ‘Educational stratification in Russia during the Soviet Period’, American Journal of Sociology 101 (1995), 611–60.CrossRefGoogle Scholar

50 See for instance Hout, M. and DiPrete, T. A., ‘What we have learned: rc28's contributions to knowledge about social stratification’, Research in Social Stratification and Mobility 24 (2006), 1–20CrossRefGoogle Scholar ; G. Esping Andersen, Three worlds of welfare capitalism (Princeton, 1990), and Changing classes: stratification and mobility in post-industrial societies (Thousand Oaks CA, 1992).

51 Clark, L. A., ‘A battle of the sexes in a professional setting: the introduction of Inspectrices Primaire [in France], 1889–1914’, French Historical Studies 16 (1989), 96–125CrossRefGoogle Scholar; Lessor, R., ‘Social movements, the occupational arena and changes in the career. The case of women flight attendants’, Journal of Occupational Behavior 5 (1984), 37–51CrossRefGoogle Scholar ; Malone, C., ‘The gendering of dangerous trades: government regulation of women's work in the white lead trade in England, 1892–1898’, Journal of Women's History 8 (1996), 15–36.CrossRefGoogle Scholar

52 Brown, Mitch and van Leeuwen, ‘The history of the modern career’. See too Laura J. Owen, ‘An economic perspective on career formation’, ibid., 42–55, and Ineke Maas, ‘The use of event-history-analysis in career research’, ibid., 56–78.

53 See, for example, Alison C. Kay, ‘Small business, self-employment and women's work-life choices in nineteenth century London’, in Mitch, Brown and van Leeuwen eds., Origins of the modern career, 191–206, and Pat Thane, ‘The careers of female graduates of Cambridge University, 1920s–1970s’, ibid., 207–26.

54 Brown, Mitch and van Leeuwen, ‘The history of the modern career’.

55 See, for example, Robin Mackie and Gerrylynn K. Roberts, ‘Career patterns in the British chemical profession during the twentieth century’, in Mitch, Brown and van Leeuwen eds., Origins of the modern career, 317–36, and Haia Shpayer-Makov, ‘Job stability and career opportunities in the work-life history of policemen in Victorian and Edwardian England’, ibid., 101–25.

56 See, for example, Mary MacKinnon, ‘Trade unions and employment stability at the Canadian Pacific Railway, 1903–1929’, in Mitch, Brown and van Leeuwen eds., Origins of the modern career, 126–44; Susan Eleanor Hirsch and Janice L. Reiff, ‘Career making at Pullman: employment stability and job mobility for railroad repair shop workers, 1915–1970’, ibid., 145–63; and Maria Silvia Badoza, ‘Skilled work and labour careers in the Argentine printing industry, 1880–1930’, ibid., 164–90.

57 See Brown, Mitch and van Leeuwen, ‘The history of the modern career’, 11–13, and Owen, ‘An economic perspective on career formation’, for a recent summary.

58 The theoretical distinction is said to be that ‘endogamy’ and ‘exogamy’ refer to situations with a limited number of discrete social classes while ‘homogamy’ and ‘heterogamy’ refer to situations where the individuals in question are situated on a continuous scale from high to low. As noted, in practice the distinction between social homogamy/heterogamy and social endogamy/exogamy is blurred.

59 For a fuller discussion of the determinants of social homogamy in past societies, with a fuller annotation, see Marco H. D. van Leeuwen and Ineke Maas, ‘Endogamy and social class in history: an overview’, in Marco H. D. van Leeuwen, Ineke Maas and Andrew Miles eds., Marriage choices and class boundaries: social endogamy in history (Supplement 13, International Review of Social History) Cambridge, 2005), 5–10. See also for example Gillis, J. R., ‘“A triumph of hope over experience”: chance and choice in the history of marriage’, International Review of Social History 44 (1999), 47–54CrossRefGoogle Scholar; King, S., ‘Chance encounters? Paths to household formation in early modern England’, International Review of Social History 44 (1999), 23–46CrossRefGoogle Scholar, and ‘Chance, choice and calculation in the process of “getting married”: a reply to John R. Gillis and Richard Wall’, International Review of Social History 44 (1999), 69–76; and Wall, R., ‘Beyond the household: marriage, household formation and the role of kin and neighbours’, International Review of Social History 44 (1999), 55–67CrossRefGoogle Scholar. Wall stresses social and economic structural factors, whereas King and Gillis emphasize chance and culture. See also S. Coonz, Marriage, a history: how love conquered marriage (New York, 2005).

60 Kalmijn, M., ‘Status endogamy in the United States’, American Journal of Sociology 97 (1991), 496–523CrossRefGoogle Scholar, and ‘Intermarriage and endogamy: causes, patterns, trends’, Annual Review of Sociology 24 (1998), 395–421.

61 Edward Shorter, The making of the modern family (New York, 1975). See also, for example, M. H. D. van Leeuwen and Maas, I., ‘Partner choice and endogamy in the nineteenth century: was there a sexual revolution in Europe?’, Journal of Social History 36 (2002), 101–23Google Scholar, and Coonz, Marriage, a history.

62 Kalmijn, M., ‘Assortative mating by cultural and economic occupational status’, American Journal of Sociology 100 (1994), 422–52CrossRefGoogle Scholar; Pierre Bourdieu, Distinction: a social critique of the judgment of taste (London, 1984).

63 Leaving aside historically exceptional cases such as where individuals assume a different gender identity.

64 Martine Segalen, Love and power in the peasant family (Chicago, 1983), 38, 41; see also O‘Hara, D., ‘“Ruled by my friends”: aspects of marriage in the diocese of Canterbury, c. 1540–1570’, Continuity and Change 6 (1991), 9–41.CrossRefGoogle Scholar

65 For a fuller discussion see van Leeuwen and Maas, ‘Endogamy and social class in history: an overview’, 5–10, and the studies by Kalmijn referred to above.